This one got past me and most (all?) of the comic book/strip sites. Comic creator Don Sherwood, who was probably best known for the short-lived Dan Flagg newspaper strip, died March 6 at a hospice in Huntersville, N.C. He was 79.
That Sherwood's passing went unnoticed in the comic community is not surprising. He was a man of mystery, telling different things to different interviewers. In one article, he claimed his first job in comics was assisting Milton Caniff on his strip, Terry and the Pirates in the early 1940s. I'm not sure that's true. In another, he said his stint on Terry was working with Caniff successor George Wunder in the early sixties. Again, I'm not sure. He did launch Dan Flagg in 1963. The strip, which was similar to Caniff's Steve Canyon but set in the Marines, only made it into a handful of newspapers and lasted but four years. Still, Sherwood told reporters it was a "…huge success, running in virtually every daily newspaper in the country in the 1960s." (As a reality check: Back when most cities had more than one newspaper, the best a strip could manage would be to appear in one paper in each city. The most successful ones were probably in about 25% of all the papers then being published.)
But Dan Flagg attained a certain notoriety among those who study comic strips. Sherwood employed others to write it (primarily Archie Goodwin) and others to draw it (including Al Williamson, Angelo Torres, Al McWilliams, George Evans and Gray Morrow). For a time, each ghost thought he was the only assistant; that Sherwood was doing all the other work on the strip. Then one evening, Goodwin, Williamson and a few of the others got together for dinner, started talking about their current projects…and discovered that they, not Sherwood, were writing and drawing Dan Flagg. The incident so amused Goodwin that he wrote a story for the first issue of Creepy (drawn by Williamson) about a comic artist named Baldo Smudge who hires others to do his strip. In the story, the ghosts get together, demand credit and more money…and are murdered by Mr. Smudge.
Dan Flagg ended in 1967 and Sherwood began working for Charlton Comics where his most notable assignment was a comic that adapted the TV series, The Partridge Family. Thereafter, it gets harder to track his career, which included a series of newspaper strips, some of which actually appeared in newspapers. He did The Flintstones for a time, primarily for the foreign market. He did a panel in conjunction with Dick Clark called Dick Clark's Rock and Roll, which I think (but am not certain) saw print. There were others that were announced and promoted, like a revival of Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, but I'm not sure if they were actually syndicated.
And I'm afraid that's about all I know about Don Sherwood. Never met the man…but I thought his passing ought to be noted someplace where folks in and around comics might learn about it. Perhaps someone else will be moved to do a little digging and find out more about him.